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Afterword
My first goal in any book is to tell a good story. In the course of doing so, themes naturally arise. Sometimes, those themes are clear only in hindsight, when the work is complete. Other times, as in Children No More, they appear the moment the story idea pops into my brain. The use of children as soldiers is one of those topics that few people like to discuss. Depending on what you read and watch, you can go a very long time without bumping into it. Do a Web search on the subject, however, and you'll find that children are fighting and dying every day. Hard numbers are, as you might expect, difficult to come by, but groups such as The International Rescue Committee
(www.theirc.org) estimate about 300,000 boys and girls are involved today in this horrific practice. I find this deeply disturbing. I think everyone should.
I understand that in the catalog of the world's woes, a cause with only a few hundred thousand sufferers may seem like a small thing. Numerically, it certainly falls way below hunger, disease, poverty, and many other vital issues our world must address. But these are children, children that adults are turning into soldiers, and that is simply wrong.
I must confess to a special connection to this cause because of a personal experience—not, I hasten to note, as a child soldier. I have never experienced anything as bad as what these boys and girls undergo. I did, however, spend three years in a youth group that trained boys in how to be soldiers. The group's intentions were good: To use military conventions and structures to teach discipline, fitness, teamwork, and many other valuable lessons. It certainly accomplished many of those goals with me. The year I joined, however, was 1965, and war was ramping up in Viet Nam. I was ten years old. On my first day, an active soldier on leave showed up and acted as our drill sergeant. That day, I saw my first—
but not my last—necklace of human ears and learned the ethics of collecting them. That day, I stood at attention in the hot Florida sun while this grown man screamed at me and, when I cried, punched me in the stomach so hard that I fell to the ground and threw up. He put his boot on my head and ground the side of my face into my vomit.
That was not the worst day I had in those three years. It wasn't even close. My worst days with that group were nothing compared to what the child soldiers endure. Nothing. The basics of this novel sprang into my mind a few years ago while I was driving with my family back from lunch. I knew it would involve child soldiers, the story of how Jon changed from the gentle boy he had been into the hard man he became, and the challenges of reintegrating child soldiers. I also knew in that same flash of insight that the book would let me depart from the classic outsider hero story structure and instead force Jon to do the one thing outsider heroes never do: Stay after the fighting is done. All of this was secondary, of course, to the story, but it all arrived at once.
I grew up believing in a number of virtues that my mother taught me were essential American beliefs. One of the most important and powerful of them was something that seemed—and still seems—so obvious to me that I have always held it close: Each generation owes the next one a better world. We owe our children a better life than the one we enjoyed.
When any group makes its children into soldiers, it is abandoning that responsibility. That group is wrong. This practice must stop, and we owe it to the former child soldiers to help reintegrate them into their societies.
I hope we pay that debt.
Acknowledgments
As with my earlier novels, David Drake reviewed and offered insightful comments on the second draft of this book. This time, though, I did not show him the outline, partly because I had not told him I was dedicating the book to him, and partly because I wanted to construct the plot and outline with no help from anyone. Despite entering later in the process, however, he still gave me vital advice that greatly improved the book. All of the problems herein are my fault, of course, but Dave again deserves credit for making the novel better than it would have been without his input.
Toni Weisskopf, my Publisher, has my gratitude for believing in the series and helping give it the success it has enjoyed. Her editorial comments on the draft I sent her were few but pitch-perfect; each one made the book better.
To everyone who purchased the earlier Jon and Lobo books ( One Jump Ahead, Slanted Jack, and Overthrowing Heaven), I offer my deep and sincere gratitude. You've made it possible for me to get paid to live and write a while longer in the universe I share with Jon and Lobo.
My business partner, Bill Catchings, has as always both done all he could to encourage and support my writing and been a great colleague for going on twenty-five years.
Elizabeth Barnes fought (and continues to fight) to tame the library portions of my home office, an effort that helps me calm myself for the work.
As I've done in the course of my previous novels, I've traveled a fair amount while working on this one, and each of the places I've visited has affected me and thus the work. I want to tip my virtual hat to the people and sites of (in rough order of my first visits there during the writing of this novel) Cambridge and Boston, Massachusetts; Austin, Texas; Las Vegas, Nevada; Portland, Oregon; Seattle, Redmond, and Kirkland, Washington; Baltimore and the surrounding suburbs, Maryland; Washington, Virginia; Holden Beach, North Carolina; San Francisco, California; Indianapolis, Indiana; San Jose and Yountville, California; and, of course, my home in North Carolina.
As always, I am grateful to my children, Sarah and Scott, who continue to be amazing teenagers and wonderful people despite having The Weird Dad and needing to put up with me regularly disappearing into my office for long periods of time. Thanks, kids.
Several extraordinary women—my wife, Rana Van Name; Jennie Faries; Gina Massel-Castater; and Allyn Vogel—grace my life with their intelligence and support, for which I'm incredibly grateful. Thank you, all.
ABOUT THE AUTHOR
Mark L. Van Name is a writer and technologist. As a science fiction author, he has published three previous novels, edited or co-edited two anthologies, and written many short stories. Those stories have appeared in a wide variety of books and magazines, including Asimov's Science Fiction Magazine, many original anthologies, and The Year's Best Science Fiction. As a technologist, he is the CEO of a fact-based marketing and technology assessment firm, Principled Technologies, Inc. , that is based in the Research Triangle area of North Carolina. He has worked with computer technology for his entire professional career and has published over a thousand articles in the computer trade press, as well as a broad assortment of essays and reviews.
For more information, visit his Web site,
www.marklvanname.com,
or follow his blog,
markvanname.blogspot.com.
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